It works like this with police ANPR though - sometimes there are indeed faults in the system, but the police are rapidly able to rectify it by simply asking the drive if they have insurance and who with as well as their details, the police then phone the insurer and can confirm it with them.
It'd work exactly the same in this case - if the pump doesn't work for you, you go speak to the attendant, give them your details, they check with the insurer, and voila, you do have insurance, they enable the pump for you.
It may well be inconvenient but it's nothing new, some people's cards fail to work in pay at pump systems and they have to go speak to the attendant for example. It's not exactly going to end your day, or life though.
But this isn't about drive-offs, it's about getting people driving illegaly off of the road because it's costing us legal and honest drivers a fortune each year.
It's about making sure those of us who pay road tax use the roads, and don't subsidise it for those who don't.
It's about making sure those of us who pay our insurance aren't paying higher premiums to subsidise the fact that some people don't pay.
It's about making sure the roads are safer and less congested because people who haven't passed their driving test are kept off the road.
To me these three key benefits are far, far more important than any misguided belief that there's more to it than that. In the UK we've had ANPR in place for over two decades now and despite it becoming more and more prevalent (it's common in service stations for example) it's still not been abused for these subversive measures people are paranoid about.
There's some misguided belief that ANPR systems deliver live video and so forth, they don't, they simply flag up an alter, which isn't to say they aren't also doubled up as video devices too, but we already have video cameras on our forecourt, and again, have done for years and years. This isn't some magic big step, it's a logical extension of a system that's been working really well and hasn't been abused since the 80s. As I say if you're paranoid about being watched or recorded then you've missed the boat - video cameras, and tracking of purchases and so forth came in years ago and have been tracking us for a long long time.
Yes, I can see you're continuing to struggle with basic logical concepts here. It's not a strawman fallacy, because I did not say nor imply you said those things. I said those things as an example of the kind of ludicrous extreme you can take the slippery slope fallacy to if you really want to believe in that sort of stupid argument. I'm sorry you didn't get that.
"When has the government NOT worked to expand their powers once they have been given some power?"
Quite a lot actually. More often than not. You see, it's only newsworthy when they do do it because the most common status is that they do not. This doesn't mean we shouldn't becareful of the times they do, but this circumstance is not one where the likelihood is particularly high relative to much more pressing laws of concern such as calls to scrap or modify the UK's ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights.
"What you call "paranoid kook" is based on firm history"
Really? Where were you brought up? Nazi Germany? Soviet Russia? North Korea? Burma? Again, the UK for all it's faults simply isn't that fucked up. Certainly it's not based on OUR history, which is really what matters here.
"I'd much rather ensure that the government can't take that kind of abusive power than give them the power hope they don't abuse it."
That's great. I'd much rather the government is allowed to use technology to aprehend criminals rather than being forced to fight crime with their arms tied behind their backs and leaving people like me to pick up the costs all because people like you think the UK is somehow on the verge of turning into a police state - I know the kind of paranoid tosh that's rife on Slashdot might suggest that's not the case, but it's simply not true. We've got more freedom now than we had decades ago, perhaps still slightly below where we were in the mid - late 90s, but for the most part it's not nearly as bad as the naysayers like to pretend.
Yeah and maybe then, when your car is stopped, they'll come out and shoot you in the head then burn your corpse out back and pretend you were never there. They may then go and rape and murder your family, and kill and burn them too. I mean, that's exactly the sort of thing that would happen in Iran or Syria, so you're obviously an idiot if you think it couldn't happen in the West.
This is called a slippery slope fallacy. Whether your argument has any validity, or mine has any validity really depends on how much of a paranoid kook you are, so you'll have to excuse me if I'm not convinced things are that bad in our country, even if they may be in yours wherever that may be. If things ever do get as bad as you suggest I expect there'll be a lot bigger issues before then, such as whether you can even own a car in the first place.
I'm actually struggling to see why the first few posts on Slashdot are suggestions that this is somehow a bad thing. If ever there was a decent use for ANPR, this is it. My insurance has rocketed in recent years and my commute gets increasingly busy over time. Getting illegal drivers off the road? Yes please.
Getting many of the little uninsured scrotes off the road with this sort of thing can only be a good thing IMO. Less chance of me being out of pocket for some arsehole that never passed his driving test and/or never bothered to pay for insurance and/or crashed into me because he lost control of his car because it wasn't road worthy and he didn't bother to get an MOT? Please, sign me up.
Really, if there's concern about feature creep and it being used to tell where I go for petrol each week then I already have bigger worries - knowing which petrol station I go to each week is a lot smaller concern for me than the fact the local supermarkets knowing how often I shop at them, and what I buy down to the most personal level in comparison. Tracking my petrol purchases would be small fry relative to all the other data that's being tracked about me in every day life and at least this would give me the tangible benefit of lower insurance premiums.
I don't see how defeating this at the ballot box would be in any way "taking your government back", unless you're assuming that everyone here is one of those afformentioned uninsured scrotes who would benefit from a government that doesn't want to go after drivers breaking the law at the expense of those who do not? This is one of those rare instances of my government working for me, not against me, and knee jerk responses simply because of the mere mention of CCTV in the topic are retarded. Not all CCTV usage is inherently bad - it's not like petrol station forecourts are even public spaces.
"An alternative interpretation of these same events is that it is Western interference that keeps making things worse. And this interpretation may well be wrong, but as an intelligent Western person who is well-informed about politics, you might want to consider if you are missing something."
I pointed to examples where the West has avoided interfering and it's just not worked. There's an argument that initial Western interference dating back many, many decades was the cause and that if we hadn't done it then then it wouldn't be an issue and I'd largely agree, but we're well past that stage. Sure this means we shouldn't interfere in new areas, but we're so well entrenched into the Middle East now that we can't just leave it without it spreading back to bite us.
"Rest assured? You assume Syria and Iran are run by people who are simply insane. Of course the Syrians might be pissed that the US has been supporting that opposition, with official visits and approving words from Mrs Clinton. They might possibly blame America for their problems. Because after all it was the aim of the opposition to secure Western help a la Libya. If the US hadn't responded as it did... But then, even if Syria does hate America, what are they going to do? Build some WMDs perhaps, like Saddam didn't?"
Again, see the 9/11 example. The secular and moderate portions of Lebanese society are breathing a rather big sigh of releif that Syria and Iran are so caught up in their own problems and feeling the financial squeeze from sanctions that they can't continue to give the likes of Hezbollah the funding and weapons they have for the last few decades.
"Donald Rumsfeld would agree."
Surprisingly, so would most politicians across all shades of the political spectrum. That's why many very left leaning European countries all the way through to very right leaning US, whatever the leader has held the same opinion.
Please realise that I'm not making the case for full blown war here, not for a minute, but simply that political pressure and covert support for dissidents and other such low level interference with these states - i.e. the sort that exploits those who genuinely want to, and hopefully eventually will see change in their country is a good way to try and limit the problems to their own back yard, and prevent them exporting them into our back yards.
My point is simply that completely isolating yourself from the region is as foolish and idiotic a solution as a full blown invasion of said countries is. The best options are low level interference, economic warfare, and support of those who want to see genuine change. The problems there just aren't problems we can walk away from without them coming back to bite us.
Agreed - does this study take into account whether people were speaking to each other? In my experience of playing Halo: Reach you're far more likely to be using voice comms with a friend than with randoms, I've played countless random games where there's been nothing but silence on voice chat.
Though I suppose you could argue that that's just part of the equation in terms of playing with friends, I do think it puts a different spin on the study - the study implies there's some magical link between friends, when in reality it could just be the entirely non-magical action of just talking to each other.
Yeah, that way we can create a new, bigger, Somalia.
Because it's not like Somalians ever leave their failed state on boats and commit piracy causing problems there or anything like that is it?
Why do you think there's renewed focus on sorting Somalia out recently? Precisely because just leaving it alone as we have since the US pulled out in the 90s has only caused other problems.
If you ignore a country like Iran or Syria completely, they'll just masacre the opposition in their countries. Once the opposition is gone you can be rest assured they'll start focussing their attacks externally to try and broaden their influence.
You can't isolate these problems, they don't just stay self contained, if left alone they grow, and spread. The finest example was probably 9/11 - America got the soviets screwed over and kicked out of Afghanistan by supporting the radical islamists then basically ditched all contact and support for the region, having just left it to fester. The islamists including al Qaeda whiped out opposition within Afghanistan and enforced their strict and brutal Islamic law, then, content with domination of their homeland, decided it'd be a good idea to spread their wings and fly planes into the World Trade Centre, at which point much of the rest of the West woke up, and had a look round, then noticed said radical islam was being preached and spread right in their own back yard, with associated terrorist attacks to follow.
To sum up, the BBC came under attack in a number of ways - cyberattack via the internet, with the source coming from Iran, and satellite jamming of their broadcasts in Iran itself. These attacks happened simultaneously and both targetted BBC Persian, rather than the BBC in general.
Unless anonymous or it's ilk have gained the ability to perform nationwide satellite broadcast jamming in recent years it's unlikely that aspect was anything other than state sponsored. As the other attacks happened at the same time, it seems surely a little too coincidental?
Iran created the "Iranian Cyber Army" in 2010, and around the same time they started massively censoring the country and throttling bandwidth to such an extent you couldn't even upload a video to YouTube.
Iran's internet is so locked down now (and no, not simply an easily bypassed Chinese style firewall) that the only way you could do this from Iranian systems right now is if you're the Iranian state and hence not party to the massive restrictions they have in place.
Hence, if they can link it back to Iranian addresses then there is little chance it can be anything other than state sponsored.
Still, for what it's worth, if you read what the BBC said, you'll see that even they were a little cautious with blame regardless. They pointed out that Iran was jamming the BBC's satellite transmissions of the BBC Persian Service - something which genuinely could only be state sponsored at the scale it was done, and that these attacks on other parts of the BBC's infrastructure related to the BBC Persian Service occured at the same time - they clearly state that this could be coincidence, but seems suspiciously a little too coincidental to really be coincidence.
I genuinely agree with your point - particularly regarding China where Chinese hackers can act unilaterally without state oversight, but Iran with it's vastly tighter internet lockdown and monitoring? and the rest of the circumstances surrounding it? I think it's pretty likely it was state sponsored, which is why the BBC's director probably felt he wasn't out of line to speak out about it.
It works this way in the UK too. Apple got in trouble for charging UK customers more on iTunes for music than in the rest of Europe.
There was a ruling against them telling them to change their prices, so they delayed changing prices as long as they could and by the time they couldn't get away with it anymore the exchange rates had changed and Apple said "Hey look, things have changed now, it's all okay to leave the prices as they were".
Don't expect governments to care though, it just means more VAT for them.
No it's not, and this was established in British courts with the OiNK case. The guy behind OiNK was found not guilty by a unanimous jury verdict of 12 - 0.
This is what the British police were referring to in the leaked conversation with the FBI where the British police basically bent over and basically said "Yes FBI masters, we know we haven't bent over for you 100% on everything in the past so to make it up, we'll do anything you want, because we're you're slaves!"
Effectively because he's done nothing illegal here, but the police/government/music industry feel he should be punished anyway, we're sending him to the US. This whole extradition is just a workaround for the government to avoid the whole inconvenience of the British justice system. This of course wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that it was a Tory Home Secretary that signed this off, this is the same Tory party that whinges about how evil the EU is because it's taking over our justice system blah blah blah. Right, so EU courts overruling the government on fundamental human rights law that it's violated is a major breach of our sovereignty we should be deeply offended about, but palming off a kid who made a website to the US as a workaround to avoid our much fairer justice system isn't? Yeah, okay Tories, whatever. Of course, it's made worse by the fact this is the same party that was attacking Labour over McKinnon's extradition and the unfair extradition treaty (their words) that they are STILL wavering on.
It's fucking ridiculous. He's not guilty of a crime here in the UK, yet we're extraditing anyway. Maybe we can extradite Theresa May to Iran to be stoned to death seeing as she doesn't wear a veil in public whilst we're at it? Please?
"There are more mobile phones being sold today than laptops and PCs combined."
Great, but there are billions of people on this planet who can't do their job on mobile phone software, millions of gamers who can't stand playing FPS games or MMOs on a phone, and plenty more people who would rather browse the web on a desktop.
Personally I can't even stand writing an e-mail on my iPad, touch keyboards of the non-Swype kind are such a pain in the ass that it's easier to just walk the fuck upstairs and write an e-mail on my desktop.
Mobile is a growing market without a doubt, but this fantasy that the desktop is going away anytime soon is a joke. Microsoft's revenue and profits aren't that far off Apples and have been ahead of theirs for the last 20 years up until about last year, or maybe the year before - it's not like they're some small company that can't survive a bit of a drop in revenue. Microsoft may have been losing marketshare this last 3 years as your comment claims, I'm not sure, but their profits have still been climbing so does it even matter?
Even the fuckup of a company that is Sony has plenty of life in it despite losing what, billions? over the last few years.
Microsoft can easily afford to lose marketshare if it means they really can do something to make it back next iteration but that's the real question, can they? Long term decline is the only real threat to them, not just a single fuckup and as they're still growing that's not currently the problem they face.
Really, Microsoft's only problem is that they're not growing as fast as they used to, well, surprise surprise, it's tough at the top. Even Apple's growth is going to slow and see a resultant drop in share price at some point. You can't sustain the kind of growth Apple has and Microsoft had before them indefinitely.
You're struggling to understand what anonymous is.
So if you can't grasp the concept of what anonymous is, each time you read it in relation to a story like this, mentally replace it with "A group of hackers".
Things will start making sense then.
Anonymous isn't one person or group, it's many groups sharing the same name. Your argument doesn't make sense, it's like seeing a green car and saying "What the hell? I thought all cars were white, why is this one different?" - there are many different colours of car, but they're still cars. Just like there are many different groups of hackers under anonymous, but they still identify with anonymous.
Angry Birds works on every equivalently priced Android handset too, and many lesser priced handsets to boot. All in, there are far more Android handsets on which Angry birds will run than iPhones.
Regardless, your focus on iOS makes one thing clear, you're a fanboy whose only interest is protecting your pet platform through some irrational feeling to protect a company whom you really owe nothing to, so I'll step out of this discussion now as it's pointless discussing something with someone who only hears what they wish to. My point was merely that Android is another platform you can choose to support to increase company profits, if you do so you have to understand it like you understand any other platform, if you do it wrong you'll fail like the developer in TFA. I'm not really interested in Android vs. iOS discussions per-se, merely that to grow a mobile business you simply cannot ignore Android, but similarly you must be sensible about how you support it. This guy wasn't, he suffered for it, but it's ultimately his loss, and his problem. You'll face the exact same problems with the PC for a desktop app because it's more awkward than supporting MacOS X, but we all know that's not really smart if you want to grow your business.
So you're saying we should ensure the authorities go after every crime? really?
Well here's news, that doesn't happen. Many laws go untouched unless the police happen upon the crime by chance - certainly they don't devote resources to them specifically, because people realise they're ridiculous.
Your implication seems to be that it's okay for the odd rape, murder, or even burglary to go unpunished or unprevented for the sake of not really having any effect beyond a symbolic gesture in the fight against filesharing.
That strikes me as a little odd, I don't think anyone should have to suffer something like rape or murder because the police were instead expending resources on file sharing simply for the sake of reasserting the view that it's illegal - something everyone engaging in it already knows, but simply doesn't care about.
The fact is some crimes being illegal is enough to put some off alone, leaving others to continue not caring about the legality of it - it doesn't mean they have to be enforced with any serious amount of manpower, nor does it mean it has to be legalised. The world isn't as black and white as you seem to mistakenly believe it is, there are many shades of grey inbetween.
"Their life is changed forever, many of them might not survive it, those who do could have their life destroyed in all kinds of ways, basically it's young people sacrificing their future."
Doesn't this say something? The fact that kids are now en-masse willing to do this?
Think it could be related to high levels of youth unemployment? a feeling of being powerless in society?
Make no mistake, these kids don't care anymore because they have no reason to, governments out of touch with the internet generation coupled with woes relating to the economic downturn have left them with little to care about. It's made an impact - even my rather conservative mother in her 60s is now expressing her anger at government going after kids and allowing them to be extradited for running file sharing link sites when there's other crimes she'd much rather they were spending resources on.
"These individuals may not be physically dead but they have no future, no career."
Agreed, it's not like any hackers have ever ended up with a decent standard of living and career, or alternative have never failed to make a name for themselves.
Kevin Mitnick lives in a damp cardboard box in some backstreet, Adrian Lamo thinks downtown Mogadishu would be a better place to be than where he is now, and no one has ever even heard of Julian Assange.
If Lulzsec did one thing, it was to bring attention to the fact that big vested government and corporate interests are not invulnerable, they can be embarassed as badly as any private citizen can by any teen sat in his/her bedroom who has simply had enough of the status quo to the point they're past caring about the consequences.
They may have been childish, foolish, egoistical, but they made far more of an impact in making their point that they're fed up of the status quo than anyone whining on Slashdot ever has.
If that subset is 95% of the Android revenue then absolutely yes, that by far makes the most sense. It's certainly far more sensible making what revenue you can from the platform with minimal effort. It's not really about relative profits from Android vs. iOS but about increasing your profits - if you want to grow your company that's what you do - you target the easy money first (i.e. iOS) then you grow it where you can, if that means focussing on a smaller set of Android devices for a 5% profit increase then it's going to be worth it as porting to and maintaining the app on the high end devices isn't hard. Muddying things by targetting every low end device going obviously is, and this is the mistake this guy made.
Samsung sold more phones than Apple last quarter by a decent margin, it's best seller was the Galaxy S II, so it's quite possible the Galaxy SII alone was on the heels of or outsold the iPhone. That's obviously not a small market.
There's just no point focussing on the budget stuff, it's not where the revenue is for things like games, mostly because such budget handsets can't run them well so people don't bother paying for them on those platforms. Devices like the Galaxy S II? Absolutely, go for it, you'd either have to be a fool or uninterested in company growth not to.
You really don't have to buy that many, because it's not the overall configuration that matters, but the GPU configurations that are the problem with games.
The OS version is really not the problem here unless you need some cutting edge feature - but again, iOS is no less prone to this - if you want to target the iPad 3's higher resolution then you've only got the iPad 3 and no other iOS devices to work with. Android has decent backwards compatibility so in terms of OS you just work with the lowest common denominator you're willing to support.
The problems arise, as with this dev, when you want to support every device under the sun, rather than a sensible subset, some Android devices at the low end don't even have hardware accellerated graphics so if you choose to support them you're bound to be creating problems for yourself. Even if you choose some of the more obscure accellerated devices you'll run into issues.
But fundamentally if you target something like the Samsung Galaxy series, and Google's phones, as well as HTC and Motorola's flagship phones then you'll still have a higher potential userbase than you have with the iPhone yet no more disparity in terms of hardware - it's only when you step outside that and go for HTC, Samsung, et. al's cheaper phones, more so if you want to target ZTE etc. budget range too.
It's still simply about being sensible as to what you support - it's no different than desktop game development always was, certain chipsets (i.e. Intel's) often weren't supported for many games - game devs didn't just try and get it to work for everything, they just focus specific minimum standards, and that's what things like DirectX 9 or DirectX 10 compatible graphics cards were all about - a guarantee that said system with said card would support a minimum standard.
On a wide ranging platform like the Windows PCs, and Android cell phones, trying to support everything is a mugs game, it's doomed to fail, but that doesn't change the fact some of the most popular software of all time has succeded on said platforms despite that issue. Again, it's about knowing your market, and targetting specific sets of hardware based on that - the guy in TFA quite obviously failed at this, which is, more than anything, a business failure, rather than a technological failure. If you're an Apple fan then consider the people who developed for iOS and found they couldn't make millions after all - plenty have complained vocally on blogs about specifically that, but is it a fault of iOS, or is it simply a case of blaming the tech rather than their inability to play out a proper set of business decisions? It's no different here.
Finding good devs is a challenge in itself, sadly the reality is that sometimes you have to put up with less than ideal candidates and that becomes a factor in your choices of tools.
One of the things I've been forced to learn over the years is that making architecture and development decisions is far from just about the technical merits of a solution, but all too often dogged in the politics and unfortunate realities of the environment you're working in. This may mean that whilst you don't want to make decisions based on the fact your devs are less than ideal, you're sometimes left with little choice.
We've been trying to rectify this in recent years by recruiting fresh graduates with a genuine passion for software development rather than a skill in any specific technology so that we can start with a near blank sheet and better guide their careers to be far more useful to the industry than the second rate monkeys who went into software because it pays the rent, and don't particularly care beyond doing the bare minimum. It's working okay so far, I got a cruel satisfaction seeing some of said second rate devs quitting in a huff when the first batch of grads from a few years back got promoted past them due to simply having put in the effort to be better at their jobs:)
On the flip side whilst not really what the GGP intended it's also a good example because it demonstrates that part of Rovio's success likely stems from the fact they understand the importance of targetting your resources against acheivable goals - i.e. only both supporting devices that are financially feasible to support.
Rovio clearly understood with Android that focussing on every device from the outset was going to be a mugs game, and targetted their release on the most popular devices, spreading out as it became financially feasible to do so. The muppet in TFA tried to support everything no matter how obscure and unlikely to turn a profit from the get go by the sounds of it.
Whilst you're right and pointing out the GP is wrong, what you say is still kind of the point.
Many games don't support the original iPhone and some even the 3GS, simply because they really are just underspecced for some of the high end games.
Android is no different in this regard - you have to be sensible about what you can realistically support. I'd be amazed if there wasn't a strong correlation between those with high end Android devices like the Galaxy SII and those putting down money on app purchases - this developer should've checked that, if that was the case they could've probably brought down their 20% of their time for 5% of their profits to 5% of their time for 5% of their profits. Chasing obscure low end devices when there's probably lower app purchasing levels on the low end budget devices is as stupid as spending weeks trying to make your game work on the original iPhone for the very small handful of people still even using it.
The complaints in the summary smell very strongly of being a failed business plan stemming from a lack of understanding about the technology being targetted above anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
It works like this with police ANPR though - sometimes there are indeed faults in the system, but the police are rapidly able to rectify it by simply asking the drive if they have insurance and who with as well as their details, the police then phone the insurer and can confirm it with them.
It'd work exactly the same in this case - if the pump doesn't work for you, you go speak to the attendant, give them your details, they check with the insurer, and voila, you do have insurance, they enable the pump for you.
It may well be inconvenient but it's nothing new, some people's cards fail to work in pay at pump systems and they have to go speak to the attendant for example. It's not exactly going to end your day, or life though.
But this isn't about drive-offs, it's about getting people driving illegaly off of the road because it's costing us legal and honest drivers a fortune each year.
It's about making sure those of us who pay road tax use the roads, and don't subsidise it for those who don't.
It's about making sure those of us who pay our insurance aren't paying higher premiums to subsidise the fact that some people don't pay.
It's about making sure the roads are safer and less congested because people who haven't passed their driving test are kept off the road.
To me these three key benefits are far, far more important than any misguided belief that there's more to it than that. In the UK we've had ANPR in place for over two decades now and despite it becoming more and more prevalent (it's common in service stations for example) it's still not been abused for these subversive measures people are paranoid about.
There's some misguided belief that ANPR systems deliver live video and so forth, they don't, they simply flag up an alter, which isn't to say they aren't also doubled up as video devices too, but we already have video cameras on our forecourt, and again, have done for years and years. This isn't some magic big step, it's a logical extension of a system that's been working really well and hasn't been abused since the 80s. As I say if you're paranoid about being watched or recorded then you've missed the boat - video cameras, and tracking of purchases and so forth came in years ago and have been tracking us for a long long time.
Yes, I can see you're continuing to struggle with basic logical concepts here. It's not a strawman fallacy, because I did not say nor imply you said those things. I said those things as an example of the kind of ludicrous extreme you can take the slippery slope fallacy to if you really want to believe in that sort of stupid argument. I'm sorry you didn't get that.
"When has the government NOT worked to expand their powers once they have been given some power?"
Quite a lot actually. More often than not. You see, it's only newsworthy when they do do it because the most common status is that they do not. This doesn't mean we shouldn't becareful of the times they do, but this circumstance is not one where the likelihood is particularly high relative to much more pressing laws of concern such as calls to scrap or modify the UK's ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights.
"What you call "paranoid kook" is based on firm history"
Really? Where were you brought up? Nazi Germany? Soviet Russia? North Korea? Burma? Again, the UK for all it's faults simply isn't that fucked up. Certainly it's not based on OUR history, which is really what matters here.
"I'd much rather ensure that the government can't take that kind of abusive power than give them the power hope they don't abuse it."
That's great. I'd much rather the government is allowed to use technology to aprehend criminals rather than being forced to fight crime with their arms tied behind their backs and leaving people like me to pick up the costs all because people like you think the UK is somehow on the verge of turning into a police state - I know the kind of paranoid tosh that's rife on Slashdot might suggest that's not the case, but it's simply not true. We've got more freedom now than we had decades ago, perhaps still slightly below where we were in the mid - late 90s, but for the most part it's not nearly as bad as the naysayers like to pretend.
Yeah and maybe then, when your car is stopped, they'll come out and shoot you in the head then burn your corpse out back and pretend you were never there. They may then go and rape and murder your family, and kill and burn them too. I mean, that's exactly the sort of thing that would happen in Iran or Syria, so you're obviously an idiot if you think it couldn't happen in the West.
This is called a slippery slope fallacy. Whether your argument has any validity, or mine has any validity really depends on how much of a paranoid kook you are, so you'll have to excuse me if I'm not convinced things are that bad in our country, even if they may be in yours wherever that may be. If things ever do get as bad as you suggest I expect there'll be a lot bigger issues before then, such as whether you can even own a car in the first place.
I'm actually struggling to see why the first few posts on Slashdot are suggestions that this is somehow a bad thing. If ever there was a decent use for ANPR, this is it. My insurance has rocketed in recent years and my commute gets increasingly busy over time. Getting illegal drivers off the road? Yes please.
Getting many of the little uninsured scrotes off the road with this sort of thing can only be a good thing IMO. Less chance of me being out of pocket for some arsehole that never passed his driving test and/or never bothered to pay for insurance and/or crashed into me because he lost control of his car because it wasn't road worthy and he didn't bother to get an MOT? Please, sign me up.
Really, if there's concern about feature creep and it being used to tell where I go for petrol each week then I already have bigger worries - knowing which petrol station I go to each week is a lot smaller concern for me than the fact the local supermarkets knowing how often I shop at them, and what I buy down to the most personal level in comparison. Tracking my petrol purchases would be small fry relative to all the other data that's being tracked about me in every day life and at least this would give me the tangible benefit of lower insurance premiums.
I don't see how defeating this at the ballot box would be in any way "taking your government back", unless you're assuming that everyone here is one of those afformentioned uninsured scrotes who would benefit from a government that doesn't want to go after drivers breaking the law at the expense of those who do not? This is one of those rare instances of my government working for me, not against me, and knee jerk responses simply because of the mere mention of CCTV in the topic are retarded. Not all CCTV usage is inherently bad - it's not like petrol station forecourts are even public spaces.
"An alternative interpretation of these same events is that it is Western interference that keeps making things worse. And this interpretation may well be wrong, but as an intelligent Western person who is well-informed about politics, you might want to consider if you are missing something."
I pointed to examples where the West has avoided interfering and it's just not worked. There's an argument that initial Western interference dating back many, many decades was the cause and that if we hadn't done it then then it wouldn't be an issue and I'd largely agree, but we're well past that stage. Sure this means we shouldn't interfere in new areas, but we're so well entrenched into the Middle East now that we can't just leave it without it spreading back to bite us.
"Rest assured? You assume Syria and Iran are run by people who are simply insane. Of course the Syrians might be pissed that the US has been supporting that opposition, with official visits and approving words from Mrs Clinton. They might possibly blame America for their problems. Because after all it was the aim of the opposition to secure Western help a la Libya. If the US hadn't responded as it did... But then, even if Syria does hate America, what are they going to do? Build some WMDs perhaps, like Saddam didn't?"
Again, see the 9/11 example. The secular and moderate portions of Lebanese society are breathing a rather big sigh of releif that Syria and Iran are so caught up in their own problems and feeling the financial squeeze from sanctions that they can't continue to give the likes of Hezbollah the funding and weapons they have for the last few decades.
"Donald Rumsfeld would agree."
Surprisingly, so would most politicians across all shades of the political spectrum. That's why many very left leaning European countries all the way through to very right leaning US, whatever the leader has held the same opinion.
Please realise that I'm not making the case for full blown war here, not for a minute, but simply that political pressure and covert support for dissidents and other such low level interference with these states - i.e. the sort that exploits those who genuinely want to, and hopefully eventually will see change in their country is a good way to try and limit the problems to their own back yard, and prevent them exporting them into our back yards.
My point is simply that completely isolating yourself from the region is as foolish and idiotic a solution as a full blown invasion of said countries is. The best options are low level interference, economic warfare, and support of those who want to see genuine change. The problems there just aren't problems we can walk away from without them coming back to bite us.
Agreed - does this study take into account whether people were speaking to each other? In my experience of playing Halo: Reach you're far more likely to be using voice comms with a friend than with randoms, I've played countless random games where there's been nothing but silence on voice chat.
Though I suppose you could argue that that's just part of the equation in terms of playing with friends, I do think it puts a different spin on the study - the study implies there's some magical link between friends, when in reality it could just be the entirely non-magical action of just talking to each other.
Yeah, that way we can create a new, bigger, Somalia.
Because it's not like Somalians ever leave their failed state on boats and commit piracy causing problems there or anything like that is it?
Why do you think there's renewed focus on sorting Somalia out recently? Precisely because just leaving it alone as we have since the US pulled out in the 90s has only caused other problems.
If you ignore a country like Iran or Syria completely, they'll just masacre the opposition in their countries. Once the opposition is gone you can be rest assured they'll start focussing their attacks externally to try and broaden their influence.
You can't isolate these problems, they don't just stay self contained, if left alone they grow, and spread. The finest example was probably 9/11 - America got the soviets screwed over and kicked out of Afghanistan by supporting the radical islamists then basically ditched all contact and support for the region, having just left it to fester. The islamists including al Qaeda whiped out opposition within Afghanistan and enforced their strict and brutal Islamic law, then, content with domination of their homeland, decided it'd be a good idea to spread their wings and fly planes into the World Trade Centre, at which point much of the rest of the West woke up, and had a look round, then noticed said radical islam was being preached and spread right in their own back yard, with associated terrorist attacks to follow.
Rather than repeat myself, see my comment here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2725743&cid=39362271
To sum up, the BBC came under attack in a number of ways - cyberattack via the internet, with the source coming from Iran, and satellite jamming of their broadcasts in Iran itself. These attacks happened simultaneously and both targetted BBC Persian, rather than the BBC in general.
Unless anonymous or it's ilk have gained the ability to perform nationwide satellite broadcast jamming in recent years it's unlikely that aspect was anything other than state sponsored. As the other attacks happened at the same time, it seems surely a little too coincidental?
Iran created the "Iranian Cyber Army" in 2010, and around the same time they started massively censoring the country and throttling bandwidth to such an extent you couldn't even upload a video to YouTube.
Iran's internet is so locked down now (and no, not simply an easily bypassed Chinese style firewall) that the only way you could do this from Iranian systems right now is if you're the Iranian state and hence not party to the massive restrictions they have in place.
Hence, if they can link it back to Iranian addresses then there is little chance it can be anything other than state sponsored.
Still, for what it's worth, if you read what the BBC said, you'll see that even they were a little cautious with blame regardless. They pointed out that Iran was jamming the BBC's satellite transmissions of the BBC Persian Service - something which genuinely could only be state sponsored at the scale it was done, and that these attacks on other parts of the BBC's infrastructure related to the BBC Persian Service occured at the same time - they clearly state that this could be coincidence, but seems suspiciously a little too coincidental to really be coincidence.
I genuinely agree with your point - particularly regarding China where Chinese hackers can act unilaterally without state oversight, but Iran with it's vastly tighter internet lockdown and monitoring? and the rest of the circumstances surrounding it? I think it's pretty likely it was state sponsored, which is why the BBC's director probably felt he wasn't out of line to speak out about it.
Canada too.
Really, the only reason Canada really suffered at all was because it's geographic location ties it strongly to the US economy.
It works this way in the UK too. Apple got in trouble for charging UK customers more on iTunes for music than in the rest of Europe.
There was a ruling against them telling them to change their prices, so they delayed changing prices as long as they could and by the time they couldn't get away with it anymore the exchange rates had changed and Apple said "Hey look, things have changed now, it's all okay to leave the prices as they were".
Don't expect governments to care though, it just means more VAT for them.
No it's not, and this was established in British courts with the OiNK case. The guy behind OiNK was found not guilty by a unanimous jury verdict of 12 - 0.
This is what the British police were referring to in the leaked conversation with the FBI where the British police basically bent over and basically said "Yes FBI masters, we know we haven't bent over for you 100% on everything in the past so to make it up, we'll do anything you want, because we're you're slaves!"
Effectively because he's done nothing illegal here, but the police/government/music industry feel he should be punished anyway, we're sending him to the US. This whole extradition is just a workaround for the government to avoid the whole inconvenience of the British justice system. This of course wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that it was a Tory Home Secretary that signed this off, this is the same Tory party that whinges about how evil the EU is because it's taking over our justice system blah blah blah. Right, so EU courts overruling the government on fundamental human rights law that it's violated is a major breach of our sovereignty we should be deeply offended about, but palming off a kid who made a website to the US as a workaround to avoid our much fairer justice system isn't? Yeah, okay Tories, whatever. Of course, it's made worse by the fact this is the same party that was attacking Labour over McKinnon's extradition and the unfair extradition treaty (their words) that they are STILL wavering on.
It's fucking ridiculous. He's not guilty of a crime here in the UK, yet we're extraditing anyway. Maybe we can extradite Theresa May to Iran to be stoned to death seeing as she doesn't wear a veil in public whilst we're at it? Please?
"There are more mobile phones being sold today than laptops and PCs combined."
Great, but there are billions of people on this planet who can't do their job on mobile phone software, millions of gamers who can't stand playing FPS games or MMOs on a phone, and plenty more people who would rather browse the web on a desktop.
Personally I can't even stand writing an e-mail on my iPad, touch keyboards of the non-Swype kind are such a pain in the ass that it's easier to just walk the fuck upstairs and write an e-mail on my desktop.
Mobile is a growing market without a doubt, but this fantasy that the desktop is going away anytime soon is a joke. Microsoft's revenue and profits aren't that far off Apples and have been ahead of theirs for the last 20 years up until about last year, or maybe the year before - it's not like they're some small company that can't survive a bit of a drop in revenue. Microsoft may have been losing marketshare this last 3 years as your comment claims, I'm not sure, but their profits have still been climbing so does it even matter?
Even the fuckup of a company that is Sony has plenty of life in it despite losing what, billions? over the last few years.
Microsoft can easily afford to lose marketshare if it means they really can do something to make it back next iteration but that's the real question, can they? Long term decline is the only real threat to them, not just a single fuckup and as they're still growing that's not currently the problem they face.
Really, Microsoft's only problem is that they're not growing as fast as they used to, well, surprise surprise, it's tough at the top. Even Apple's growth is going to slow and see a resultant drop in share price at some point. You can't sustain the kind of growth Apple has and Microsoft had before them indefinitely.
You're struggling to understand what anonymous is.
So if you can't grasp the concept of what anonymous is, each time you read it in relation to a story like this, mentally replace it with "A group of hackers".
Things will start making sense then.
Anonymous isn't one person or group, it's many groups sharing the same name. Your argument doesn't make sense, it's like seeing a green car and saying "What the hell? I thought all cars were white, why is this one different?" - there are many different colours of car, but they're still cars. Just like there are many different groups of hackers under anonymous, but they still identify with anonymous.
No shit, that's because anonymous isn't one centralised group with a single purpose but a group of many with many purposes.
"Yes Samsung sold more phones, but nowhere near as many smartphones."
No, check again, they outsold Apple in terms of smartphones. Apologies though, it was for the whole year, not the quarter:
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/30/01/2012/52838/samsung-out-sells-apple-in-smartphones-in-2011.htm
Angry Birds works on every equivalently priced Android handset too, and many lesser priced handsets to boot. All in, there are far more Android handsets on which Angry birds will run than iPhones.
Regardless, your focus on iOS makes one thing clear, you're a fanboy whose only interest is protecting your pet platform through some irrational feeling to protect a company whom you really owe nothing to, so I'll step out of this discussion now as it's pointless discussing something with someone who only hears what they wish to. My point was merely that Android is another platform you can choose to support to increase company profits, if you do so you have to understand it like you understand any other platform, if you do it wrong you'll fail like the developer in TFA. I'm not really interested in Android vs. iOS discussions per-se, merely that to grow a mobile business you simply cannot ignore Android, but similarly you must be sensible about how you support it. This guy wasn't, he suffered for it, but it's ultimately his loss, and his problem. You'll face the exact same problems with the PC for a desktop app because it's more awkward than supporting MacOS X, but we all know that's not really smart if you want to grow your business.
So you're saying we should ensure the authorities go after every crime? really?
Well here's news, that doesn't happen. Many laws go untouched unless the police happen upon the crime by chance - certainly they don't devote resources to them specifically, because people realise they're ridiculous.
Your implication seems to be that it's okay for the odd rape, murder, or even burglary to go unpunished or unprevented for the sake of not really having any effect beyond a symbolic gesture in the fight against filesharing.
That strikes me as a little odd, I don't think anyone should have to suffer something like rape or murder because the police were instead expending resources on file sharing simply for the sake of reasserting the view that it's illegal - something everyone engaging in it already knows, but simply doesn't care about.
The fact is some crimes being illegal is enough to put some off alone, leaving others to continue not caring about the legality of it - it doesn't mean they have to be enforced with any serious amount of manpower, nor does it mean it has to be legalised. The world isn't as black and white as you seem to mistakenly believe it is, there are many shades of grey inbetween.
"Their life is changed forever, many of them might not survive it, those who do could have their life destroyed in all kinds of ways, basically it's young people sacrificing their future."
Doesn't this say something? The fact that kids are now en-masse willing to do this?
Think it could be related to high levels of youth unemployment? a feeling of being powerless in society?
Make no mistake, these kids don't care anymore because they have no reason to, governments out of touch with the internet generation coupled with woes relating to the economic downturn have left them with little to care about. It's made an impact - even my rather conservative mother in her 60s is now expressing her anger at government going after kids and allowing them to be extradited for running file sharing link sites when there's other crimes she'd much rather they were spending resources on.
"These individuals may not be physically dead but they have no future, no career."
Agreed, it's not like any hackers have ever ended up with a decent standard of living and career, or alternative have never failed to make a name for themselves.
Kevin Mitnick lives in a damp cardboard box in some backstreet, Adrian Lamo thinks downtown Mogadishu would be a better place to be than where he is now, and no one has ever even heard of Julian Assange.
If Lulzsec did one thing, it was to bring attention to the fact that big vested government and corporate interests are not invulnerable, they can be embarassed as badly as any private citizen can by any teen sat in his/her bedroom who has simply had enough of the status quo to the point they're past caring about the consequences.
They may have been childish, foolish, egoistical, but they made far more of an impact in making their point that they're fed up of the status quo than anyone whining on Slashdot ever has.
If that subset is 95% of the Android revenue then absolutely yes, that by far makes the most sense. It's certainly far more sensible making what revenue you can from the platform with minimal effort. It's not really about relative profits from Android vs. iOS but about increasing your profits - if you want to grow your company that's what you do - you target the easy money first (i.e. iOS) then you grow it where you can, if that means focussing on a smaller set of Android devices for a 5% profit increase then it's going to be worth it as porting to and maintaining the app on the high end devices isn't hard. Muddying things by targetting every low end device going obviously is, and this is the mistake this guy made.
Samsung sold more phones than Apple last quarter by a decent margin, it's best seller was the Galaxy S II, so it's quite possible the Galaxy SII alone was on the heels of or outsold the iPhone. That's obviously not a small market.
There's just no point focussing on the budget stuff, it's not where the revenue is for things like games, mostly because such budget handsets can't run them well so people don't bother paying for them on those platforms. Devices like the Galaxy S II? Absolutely, go for it, you'd either have to be a fool or uninterested in company growth not to.
You really don't have to buy that many, because it's not the overall configuration that matters, but the GPU configurations that are the problem with games.
The OS version is really not the problem here unless you need some cutting edge feature - but again, iOS is no less prone to this - if you want to target the iPad 3's higher resolution then you've only got the iPad 3 and no other iOS devices to work with. Android has decent backwards compatibility so in terms of OS you just work with the lowest common denominator you're willing to support.
The problems arise, as with this dev, when you want to support every device under the sun, rather than a sensible subset, some Android devices at the low end don't even have hardware accellerated graphics so if you choose to support them you're bound to be creating problems for yourself. Even if you choose some of the more obscure accellerated devices you'll run into issues.
But fundamentally if you target something like the Samsung Galaxy series, and Google's phones, as well as HTC and Motorola's flagship phones then you'll still have a higher potential userbase than you have with the iPhone yet no more disparity in terms of hardware - it's only when you step outside that and go for HTC, Samsung, et. al's cheaper phones, more so if you want to target ZTE etc. budget range too.
It's still simply about being sensible as to what you support - it's no different than desktop game development always was, certain chipsets (i.e. Intel's) often weren't supported for many games - game devs didn't just try and get it to work for everything, they just focus specific minimum standards, and that's what things like DirectX 9 or DirectX 10 compatible graphics cards were all about - a guarantee that said system with said card would support a minimum standard.
On a wide ranging platform like the Windows PCs, and Android cell phones, trying to support everything is a mugs game, it's doomed to fail, but that doesn't change the fact some of the most popular software of all time has succeded on said platforms despite that issue. Again, it's about knowing your market, and targetting specific sets of hardware based on that - the guy in TFA quite obviously failed at this, which is, more than anything, a business failure, rather than a technological failure. If you're an Apple fan then consider the people who developed for iOS and found they couldn't make millions after all - plenty have complained vocally on blogs about specifically that, but is it a fault of iOS, or is it simply a case of blaming the tech rather than their inability to play out a proper set of business decisions? It's no different here.
Finding good devs is a challenge in itself, sadly the reality is that sometimes you have to put up with less than ideal candidates and that becomes a factor in your choices of tools.
One of the things I've been forced to learn over the years is that making architecture and development decisions is far from just about the technical merits of a solution, but all too often dogged in the politics and unfortunate realities of the environment you're working in. This may mean that whilst you don't want to make decisions based on the fact your devs are less than ideal, you're sometimes left with little choice.
We've been trying to rectify this in recent years by recruiting fresh graduates with a genuine passion for software development rather than a skill in any specific technology so that we can start with a near blank sheet and better guide their careers to be far more useful to the industry than the second rate monkeys who went into software because it pays the rent, and don't particularly care beyond doing the bare minimum. It's working okay so far, I got a cruel satisfaction seeing some of said second rate devs quitting in a huff when the first batch of grads from a few years back got promoted past them due to simply having put in the effort to be better at their jobs :)
On the flip side whilst not really what the GGP intended it's also a good example because it demonstrates that part of Rovio's success likely stems from the fact they understand the importance of targetting your resources against acheivable goals - i.e. only both supporting devices that are financially feasible to support.
Rovio clearly understood with Android that focussing on every device from the outset was going to be a mugs game, and targetted their release on the most popular devices, spreading out as it became financially feasible to do so. The muppet in TFA tried to support everything no matter how obscure and unlikely to turn a profit from the get go by the sounds of it.
Whilst you're right and pointing out the GP is wrong, what you say is still kind of the point.
Many games don't support the original iPhone and some even the 3GS, simply because they really are just underspecced for some of the high end games.
Android is no different in this regard - you have to be sensible about what you can realistically support. I'd be amazed if there wasn't a strong correlation between those with high end Android devices like the Galaxy SII and those putting down money on app purchases - this developer should've checked that, if that was the case they could've probably brought down their 20% of their time for 5% of their profits to 5% of their time for 5% of their profits. Chasing obscure low end devices when there's probably lower app purchasing levels on the low end budget devices is as stupid as spending weeks trying to make your game work on the original iPhone for the very small handful of people still even using it.
The complaints in the summary smell very strongly of being a failed business plan stemming from a lack of understanding about the technology being targetted above anything else.